Understand Implicit and Explicit Waits in Selenium WebDriver:
In our last instructional exercise, we examined WebDriver’s loop and conditional activities, highlighting strategies for dealing with the visibility of web components. Such procedures can be vital when dealing with an array of conditions.
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In this complimentary Selenium tutorial series, we’ll delve deeper into the topic of the various waiting mechanisms in Selenium WebDriver. We’ll also touch on the numerous navigation alternatives that WebDriver has to offer.
Waits play a vital role when it comes to troubleshooting issues that might crop up when navigating to various web pages, refreshing the page, and loading new web elements. Delays may occur because of Ajax calls or reloading of the page, causing the visibility of web elements on the page to be postponed.
Frequently, individuals toggle between different web pages. WebDriver accommodates simulation purposes by providing the navigate() commands/methods, which allow individuals to traverse through web pages using the browser’s history.
WebDriver offers two types of waits to deal with page reloads, loading of web elements, the appearance of windows, pop-ups, error messages, and the reflection of elements on the web page:
- Implicit Wait
- Explicit Wait
Let’s take a closer look at each, using pragmatic examples.
Contents:
WebDriver Implicit Wait
Implicit waits involve setting a default waiting period (e.g., 30 seconds) between each test step/command in the test script. The next test step will only proceed once the designated timespan has passed since the execution of the preceding test step/command.
Key Points
- The implicit wait is a single code line and can be declared in the setup method of the test script.
- Relative to explicit waits, implicit waits are more intuitive and user-friendly. The syntax and the approach are more straightforward than explicit waits.
However, implicit waits do have drawbacks. They may extend the runtime of the test script as each command stalls for a fixed timeframe before returning to execution.
To address this problem, WebDriver developed explicit waits. We can implement explicit waits as required, instead of waiting for every test step to execute.
Import Instructions
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit – This package is required to enable implicit waits in our test script.
Syntax
drv.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
To set the implicit wait in your test script, include this line of code immediately after initiating the WebDriver instance variable.
Code Walkthrough
The implicit wait necessitates two parameter values. The first input signifies the waiting time in numerical figures, while the second input designates the unit of time measurement. In the code example above, the usual waiting period is set as 30 seconds with the time unit identified as “seconds”.
WebDriver Explicit Wait
Explicit waits are employed to suspend execution until a specific condition is met or the maximum duration has elapsed. Unlike implicit waits, explicit waits are only applied to specific instances.
WebDriver incorporates classes like WebDriverWait and ExpectedConditions to implement explicit waits in test scripts. In this case, we will use “gmail.com” as an example.
Automation Scenario
- Open the web browser and navigate to “gmail.com”
- Input a valid username
- Input a valid password
- Click the sign-in button
- Wait until the Compose button becomes visible after the page is fully loaded
WebDriver Code Leveraging Explicit wait
Please note, for script creation, we’ll use the “Learning_Selenium” project that was established in earlier tutorials.
Step 1: Under the “Learning_Selenium” project, create a new Java class named “Wait_Demonstration”. <…rest of the text is truncated for brevity…>